Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/493

 THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 477 The original subject-concept becomes differentiated in a number of predicate-concepts. Or, to express the same thing in terms of judgment, the judgment which predicates mere existence of a something to be known is extended into a system of judgments which tell us what is to be known about it. But secondly we seek to understand what we have learned, to connect one predicate-concept with another. Ordinary experience brings with it the conviction not only of its own poverty as compared with the infinite riches of the world, but of its own inward discordancy as compared with a vision of harmony and ultimate transparency a transparency which for logic must consist in the consistency and coherence of the judg- ments which we are forced to make upon reality as it comes before us in ordinary sense-perception and in the processes of scientific investigation. Knowledge may thus be said to aim in the first place at its own expansion. It seeks to embrace reality in all its parts or details. It aims in the second place at explanation. It seeks to un- derstand the relation of the parts to one another, and to the whole to which they belong. Its ideal may thus be schematised as a whole of clear and distinct parts related to one another in such a way that the mind can pass from any one along the lines of judgment and inference to any other, with the result that the whole is seen to be reflected into every part, and every part to contain the whole. Whether the world can ever thus be reduced to complete transparency is a question with which we need not trouble ourselves at present ; it is sufficient to note not only that all science proceeds upon the assumption that it can, but that those sciences which are most advanced, and which as "deductive" are commonly taken as the types of complete- ness and certainty, really do to a certain extent exhibit these characteristics. Thus geometry aims in the first place at exhausting and in the second place at proving the inter- connexion of the properties of the figures with which it deals, and it would not be difficult to throw the knowledge we derive from it as to any particular figure, e.g., the triangle, into a form which would exhibit the properties of the figure as such and of each of the separate species of it (if it has species) as necessary deductions from its own nature and as thus inherently related to one another through their common relation to the whole whose properties they are.